Lost and Found
by wordwitch
Summary: Over one hundred years after Elizabeth's death, Will is still captain of the Ductchman in his own personal hell. But when a young woman appears calling herself Elizabeth, will he let her join his crew? Can the present heal the past?
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: I just thought of this during a crazy 'what if' game with myself... Here goes nothing! And this is coming from the girl who said she'd never write a Will/Elizabeth, too...**

**The Pirates movies take place in the 1730s, FYI.**

* * *

_"There is nothing in the world so wonderful as to love and be loved; there is nothing so devastating as love lost." -an old Proverb_

* * *

He remembered her eyes best. Golden brown, with flickers of light that shone when he kissed her and held her and pretended he could be with her forever. 

He missed eyes the most, he pondered, as he stood on the deck of his own personal hell, _The Flying Dutchman_. The dead he ferried over to the other side rarely had eyes with any kind of light in them at all, but even if they had, their light could never have shone as brightly as _hers_.

It had been over one hundred years since he had seen those eyes. One hundred years of sailing all over the world, into every place except her arms.

One hundred long, terrible years.

His crew had come to accept that he rarely made it a habit to speak to the dead they retrieved at sea. Even though they came alive as they came on his ship, ready to be taken to the other side, he could rarely bring himself to speak to someone that wasn't her.

But this woman was different.

It wasn't that she looked like Elizabeth, no, not at all... It was merely the fact that she was the opposite of her that drew his curiosity. Her skin fair to Elizabeth's tan, her hair dark and tightly curled to Elizabeth's golden (How many times would he compare her to treasure?) waves, her build short and slight to Elizabeth's tall and thin.

He wondered how someone who looked nothing like her at all could still cause his throat to constrict tightly as he managed a "How do you do" and helped her aboard the _Dutchman_, as he had helped thousands and thousands of people who died at sea over the years.

"I assume I have died, yes?" she snapped impatiently, clearly unimpressed by the afterlife.

"You assume correctly, Miss...?"

She smiled ironically. "If I truly have ended life with the living, you and I might as well be on first name terms. Are you the one they tell the stories about? Are you William Turner?"

He nodded, wishing for the hand still in his to be someone else's, someone else's hand he could never hold again. "I am," he said heavily. "Call me Will. I'm afraid I still lack your name, however."

"It's Elizabeth," she said, making him jump in surprise. "But no one ever calls- called me that, you see... They called me Beth."

He nodded in relief, thanking God that her family and friends hadn't called her Liz, or Lizzie, or any of a wide variety of names he could not utter without feeling a renewed sense of loss. He could not bear much more of this burden...

"Well, Beth, welcome aboard _The Flying Dutchman_."

* * *

Four days. 

He had seen her four days in forty years before she died. He had known he was going to outlive her, known as soon as his heart was put into the chest. He had thought that any extra time at all with her would be worth it, even if those times were few and far between.

They had been more than worth it, of course. It just made it hurt all the more now that she was gone.

He hated the small, traitorous part of himself, the part that had always wished she would die at sea so that he could be the one to ferry her over to the next world. He hated himself because he knew personally that this would be one of the worst ways to go, her lungs filling up with too much water and her cheeks turning blue...

And yet.

He would have taken a detour around the world for her before taking her to the other side. Or maybe he never would have taken her, and she could have stayed on the ship with him, a little bit of Heaven in the midst of his Hell. He didn't know if that was allowed, exactly, as no one had ever stopped to explain the rules of his occupation to him.

But they would have made it work, and they could have been together.

* * *

Beth was pacing the deck, glaring at any of the strange sea creatures that crewed the ship whenever they managed to come too close. 

She normally hated people who paced, but this pacing was preferable to coming to terms with her death. She was eighteen in this glorious year of 1890, and, just like that, she was dead. Beth furrowed her eyebrows in that way her mother had always hated and said made her far less attractive than she really was.

How had she died?

She couldn't remember.

Muttering a curse she had learned from her older brother, she wracked her mind, trying to think, trying to organize her scattered recollections. She was momentarily distracted, however, by William Turner.

Something drew her to him. It wasn't his looks, though he certainly had those. It was the way he moved, as if he were supporting a person who wasn't there.

Beth understood loss, but she had never seen such an acute example as this grief-stricken man before her.

She watched as he issued commands and the waterlogged creatures immediately followed them, changing the direction of the ship. She watched as the wind swept back his hair. She watched as this caused him to touch his lips, feeling a ghost of a person who no longer existed.

To be terribly blunt, Beth was not happy with her short life. She had always vowed to help people later, when she was married and a mother, but fate had had other ideas. But who said she couldn't help someone after she was dead?

* * *

_Lizzie,_ he would say now, _look at this sunset. Look at the way that cloud over there looks like a twisted tree, like the one we first held hands under when we were twelve._

_Look at the way it resembles two hearts, one broken and locked away._

He was startled out of his illusion when a hand gently tapped his arm. "Will Turner," announced Beth, "I would like to join your crew."

* * *

**Well, lemme know if you like it so far... I'll try to update soon if I get a positive response.**

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	2. Chapter 2

**Sorry for the wait... Got caught up in all of the Harry Potter madness and had to go into a flurry of writing in that world for awhile.**

* * *

_"I answer the heroic question "Death, where is they sting?" with "It is here in my heart and mind and memories."" -Maya Angelou_

* * *

_"Will Turner," announced Beth, "I would like to join your crew."_

He was startled by the question, of course. No one had ever asked to join his crew; most begged to leave it. Will asked a simple question: "Why?"

"Because," she said, almost bitterly, "I'm not finished living."

If he were in the time of _before_ he might have laughed, but now nothing seemed to interest him enough to generate humor. "How do you expect live among the dead?"

"You do."

He blinked, not expecting the almost-accusation. He considered for a moment trying to explain to her how he considered himself a member of the dead now that he was completely void of anything worth living for.

But rather than attempting to explain, he merely said, "You may serve me for one month, Miss Elizabeth."

Elizabeth wondered why his voice cracked when he said her name and why his eyes could not meet hers.

* * *

Will didn't sleep much that night. 

_She was running from him. "Oh Will!" she sang, "You will never catch me!" She laughed, her long legs eating up the ground as she sprinted down the beach towards the setting sun. __He ran after her, grinning, his longer strides quickly overtaking her shorter ones, but right when he reached for her, she turned from his Lizzie into Elizabeth. __"Mr. Turner, I would like to join your crew."_

_Forcing down the surging disappointment that was rising as quickly as bile, Will shoved this new Elizabeth away from him, where she fell, sprawling onto the sand. __She promptly changed back into his Elizabeth, her features shimmering in the heat. "Why did you push me, Will?" she asked, her voice full of hurt._

_He reached out a hand to help her up, horrified at what he had surely imagined her changing into. "My apologies, my dear... I do not know what came over me." _

_When Elizabeth forgave him, her smile was brighter than the setting sun. He traced her jaw with his fingertips, memorizing its shape, and then he leaned in to kiss her. __But when they were centimeters apart, she changed again, growing dark curls and losing height. "I'm not finished living," she said, and he watched every movement of her lips before realizing how close they still were._

_He jerked away, confusion washing over him in waves as large as those the tide was rolling in, and then he woke up._

Drenched in sweat, he got out of bed and walked out on deck. "Elizabeth," he whispered to the empty air, "Why do you do this to me?"

But he did not know to which Elizabeth he was speaking.

* * *

Elizabeth didn't sleep much that night.

_"Father, how much longer until we reach India?" Elizabeth stood on the deck of a ship with blue ocean and sky stretching all around, peering over to gaze into the ocean's shadowy depths._

_"One week, I believe," replied her father in all his white-wigged glory. He had aged more in the two months since her mother had died than he had in years, and his once-handsome face was lined with wrinkles of grief and not of time._

_The family doctor had prescribed a change of scenery for Elizabeth and her father, her father for his physical health and Elizabeth for her mental health (the doctor had treated her when she was fell ill six months earlier with a broken heart) and so they were moving to India from England, which had been Elizabeth's home for all of her life._

_Her father had argued profusely with Elizabeth at first, saying she needed to find a husband before she moved out of the country, but Elizabeth had declined, saying she would never marry._

_Or rather, the only man she would marry, she couldn't have, so she would try to ignore the love aspect of her life altogether._

_It must have been because she was thinking of _him_ that she first saw his face when she was gazing into the water. But she tried to blink away the conjured image, and there it remained. She turned to her father, wondering if he had noticed anything, but he stood in the same place he had been in before, undisturbed._

_She knew the doctor would have said that she was seeing things again, or that she was simply _hoping_ so much that she had merely conjured the image in the ocean, but she couldn't help it, couldn't stop it._

_Elizabeth had to know. She had to know if that was really him in the water._

_So she did what she told herself was the only rational thing to do: she jumped._

_She heard her father's yell and her scream simultaneously, just before she broke the surface of the water. She scanned the water, searching for his face and for _him_, but she did not see the man she was once supposed to marry._

_Elizabeth realized too late how heavy her dress was. She realized too late that she had not gulped a large enough pocket of air._

_She tried to fight her way to the surface, tried to fight her way back into the world of the living._

_But when her vision started going black, she realized it was too late, and she simply gave herself up to the waves._

When Elizabeth woke, she was drenched in cold sweat, panting as if she had run a great distance. She lightly stepped out of her bed, pushed open the door, and walked out on deck.

* * *

Will was too immersed in his thoughts to be startled when Elizabeth walked up to him. "You couldn't seem to find sleep either?" he asked, and found that he was actually interested to hear her answer.

"No. And you?"

He shuddered. "Bad dreams."

"I know what you mean," she said, watching him solemnly. She wondered if he, too, had dreamed of his lost one.

"What did you dream of?"

"The night that I died."

"In my _occupation_, I suppose you could say, I am granted a small amount of information about how each person died. You jumped off of a ship and drowned, am I correct?"

She nodded.

"However, I never know the _whys _of death. _Why_ did you jump off of that ship, Elizabeth?"

"I thought-" her voice faltered. "I thought I saw the man I was supposed to marry in the ocean."

"Did he die before the wedding?" asked Will timidly.

"No, he- he left. And I haven't heard from him since." Her voice suddenly became hopeful and alive. "But he was a sea captain, and I- Will, a selfish part of me hopes that he might actually have died at sea on his last voyage before our wedding. That would be easier to bear than the thought of him going away and leaving me... If he died at sea, you would know, am I right?"

Will's tone was gentle. "I doubt I would remember him. You are the first person I've talked to in decades, Elizabeth. What was his name?"

She swallowed hard before saying, "Jack Sparrow. _Captain_ Jack Sparrow."

* * *

**I would love some feedback on this...**

**Thanks to those who have already reviewed!**


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